NPP must criticise sensibly – Tony Aidoo

The Head of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, Dr. Tony Aidoo has stated that anybody who sets out to criticise the government must provide adequate details for the criticism to be considered ‘sensible’.

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) members of Parliament on Wednesday questioned the NDC government heavy borrowing, which according to them, is used for dubious payment of judgment debts to cronies.

They also mentioned that public debt has increased from GHC 9.5 billion to GHC 33.5 billion.

In response, Dr. Aidoo indicated that businessman Alfred Woyome who was paid GHC 51 million judgment debt “is a financial liability incurred for the government or the state of Ghana through the mal-administration under the NPP under President Kufuor.”

He accused the Kufuor administration of incurring the judgment debts the NDC government has been paying since it took over in 2008.

“Virtually every contract that has attracted judgment debt…have arisen as a result of a unilateral or inequitable or illegal or illegitimate abrogation of contracts by the previous Kufuor administration.”

Dr. Aidoo mentioned that the NPP created the liability and the NDC under the late President John Mills “responded to his constitutional and moral obligation by actually paying these debts.”

He however clarified that the judgments debts were not paid from borrowed funds but through budgetary allocation insisting that “every money that the NDC government under President Mills borrowed were project related borrowing…every loan that has gone to constitute the national debt over the last four years, they were active participants in the process of the approval of the loans.”

He therefore challenged the NPP MPs that if they are able to “show evidence to the contrary, then they are making sensible criticism.”

A former Minister of State at the Finance Ministry, Dr. Anthony Akoto Osei however noted that the NDC government has breached the Appropriation Act therefore, “the government has broken the law. We need to know what the money was spent on. So the matter is, why has government broken the law when Parliament did not approve that? These expenditures cannot be explained.”